First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria

From Tolstoy to F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Steinbeck, Hemingway and Joyce to… Eve Brown-Waite? Don’t think so.  Brown-Waite’s book First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria is in the truest sense a “love story” and all that connotes.  Think about the granola-“ish” young woman wanting to join the Peace Corps and on the way through the process she falls in love with the recruiter.  Hmmm… you get the picture?  If not, delve into this true-life “tell-all” story of the gory details of Eve Brown leaving her high school sweetheart from SUNY Oneonta to trail the guy helping her into her dream of going abroad to help the world.  Brown does in fact “bed down” with John Waite before she actually gets the Peace Corps gig – I guess that’s what happened every time she showed up to his pad and got under his African blanket.  I thought that would be unethical to have sex with a recruiter, I guess love knows no boundaries.  Brown’s dream was to recount her life and getting her man, unfortunately it wasn’t my dream to read it, but alas this is the RA Favorite Book list, so I read it.  Maybe I am being too cynical, sorry.  This is a quaint enough story giving the highs and lows of her life through the application portion of the Peace Corps through her 9 month trip to Mexico and back to the states to get her man.  The story concludes with marriage in Uganda and raising a child in the very dangerous part of the country called Arua.  Eve shares her difficulty with her psychotic break based on reliving the trauma of sexual abuse earlier in her life while away in Mexico helping rape victims, the difficulty of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and living in unsanitary conditions in Africa.  She does give a picture that life in the Peace Corps and other non-profits trying to help modernize third world countries is not to be romanticized.  The letters to home at the end of the chapter could in fact been placed together and made the book a heck of a lot shorter, and probably more enjoyable.  My fear is this will turn into a weekly Lifetime Channel miniseries.  This is not high brow reading, more like a series of articles you might read in an airplane magazine.  While Ms. Brown-Waite is probably a lovely person, the story was ho-hum.  The Peace Corps piece seemed to take a back seat to the “love story.”  I’d take a pass on this one.